"Over the past few days, I discovered that the Gentoo Foundation's charter is in the process of being revoked by the state of New Mexico, apparently due to regular paperwork not being filed by the trustees. What this means is that the Gentoo Foundation is currently hanging for its life by a string, and at any day could cease to exist as an entity. That is the very bad news. The good news is that I was able to talk to Grant Goodyear (trustee) this morning on the phone, and I have confirmed that Grant had received my email about the revocation issue that I sent 2 days ago and that he will be resolving this critical issue in the next couple of days by filing the appropriate paperwork with the state of New Mexico, and this paperwork will also remove me as President of the Foundation."

If you're referring to stable arch then yes, maybe it is two versions behind but thats just the way things are is with Gentoo. People wanted a stable package level and thats what they got, gentoo has at heart always been about being bleeding edge so itś not surprising the stable packages are updated a little slowly and as someone else has pointed out you don't have to sit at either arch or ~arch, you can pick and choose.

i hope you understand that stable releases mean fewer bugs. It's not a feature or an advantage to delay so much to get stable version. Kde is 3.5.5 stable while almost all the other major distro have move to 3.5.6.
If thats how Gentoo works well, something is wrong (and wasn't always like that).
Bleeding edge in terms of a testing release is not a unique feature tou gentoo. Take fedora and upgrade to rawhide, there you are.
The point is that if you want to be at the bleeding edge like a whole distro then you have to make it stable before all the others, and support the new version from day one upstream release it.
But something like that demands more developers and some passion that i'm afraid they have lost...

"i hope you understand that stable releases mean fewer bugs. It's not a feature or an advantage to delay so much to get stable version. Kde is 3.5.5 stable while almost all the other major distro have move to 3.5.6."

I suspect developers would welcome you doing so, so you are able to feedback to problems with building the package, or in the application itself, or effect it has on other packages.

I use Gentoo, I *like* the package management system. Do *you* understand how it works.

kde 3.5.7 is available in unstable, http://packages.gentoo.org/search/?sstring=kde you are simply lying. You have the *option* of choosing to run certain *bleeding* edge unstable packages; *any* gentoo user knows that to do this you simply add the name of the package to /etc/portage/package.use...and do this once. I do this *routinely* for games as I think that games do not effect system stability, and X/Mesa as the open-source ati graphics cards, fix more problems that they create.

You can even choose those svn ebuilds for certain packages...build one yourself, copy the ebuild into...I'm bored your a little liar.

Just looking at the *other* lie I advise you to look at the Gentoo weekly newsletters. I advise you to look at the section marked *Gentoo developer moves* if you look through you can see that Gentoo is attracting *more* developers not less. In fact my one point, is that Gentoo doesn't need more developers, although they are always welcome as this means a *larger* number of packages can be supported, but people to look after *administration* *legal issues* *unique look* *advertising* etc etc.

Using data from the GWN doesn't make a solid argument. It does present many new developers, but it doesn't say anything about developers losing dedication or just going AWOL. If anything, the quality of the GWN, which took a severe beating since early 2006, does seem to confirm some disenchantment in the project by the community since its glory days.

It's definitely more than a question of *paperwork*. Bring all the *developers*, *artists* and *bureaucrats* you want together, chances they won't do anything worthwhile without sharing a *common vision*. Now, settling on a common vision isn't trivial...

This is where leadership comes into the equation. Add an healthy dose of leadership to the vision, you'll get a guy/gal that will gladly handle that dull paperwork. Dismiss them, you'll get an advice for the revocation of your foundation because the guy/gal just didn't cared... Of course, money would do the same trick, but it would remove the fun factor from being a part of a dynamic community.

Gentoo doesn't lack people, it lacks vision and leadership. In fact, it's pretty much what drobbins raised up in his blog. Let's see how it will go, but I doubt the project will get a better image (and everything coming with that) until they fill that void.

Kde is 3.5.5 stable while almost all the other major distro have move to 3.5.6

Do you even know what changed between 3.5.5 and 3.5.6?
Something revolutionary I'm sure.

Maybe it is not stable for a reason.
Put it this way....one distro needs to be the first to have a particular version marked stable and one distro needs to be last.
I have a feeling someone would bitch about either.

"Distro A is so far behind, they're only at version X of package Y!"

or...

"Distro B is so fast to mark the latest packages stable and that busted package hosed my machine."